The Adolescence of AI in Medicine: Will the Field Come of Age in the '90's?

Reference: Shortliffe, E. H. The Adolescence of AI in Medicine: Will the Field Come of Age in the '90's? November, 1992.

Abstract: Artificial intelligence in medicine (AIM) has reached a period of adolescence
in which interactions with the outside world are not only natural but
mandatory. Although the basic research topics in AIM may be those of
artificial intelligence, the applied issues touch more generally on the broad
field of medical informatics. To the extent that AIM research is driven by
performance goals for biomedicine, AIM is simply one component within a wide
range of research and development activities. Furthermore, an adequate
appraisal of AIM research requires an understanding of the research
motivations, the complexity of the problems, and a suitable definition of the
criteria for judging the field's success. Effective fielding of AIM systems
will be dependent on the development of integrated environments for
communication and computing that allow merging of knowledge-based tools with
other patient data-management and information-retrieval applications. The
creation of this kind of infrastructure will require vision and resources from
leaders who realize that the practice of medicine is inherently an
information-management task and that biomedicine must make the same kind of
coordinated commitment to computing technologies as have other segments of our
society in which the importance of information management is well understood.